Rhodium launched a med-spa marketing platform by merging in three DTC beauty brands

Rhodium is a Seattle-area startup selling SaaS that uses machine learning and AI to help medical spas and beauty brands automate marketing and customer touch-points.

A marketing-AI platform proven on its own portfolio of direct-to-consumer beauty brands will sell better to spas and beauty brands than a pure software start-up.

$2 million in initial funding from Relevance Ventures, Loeb Ventures and others

CEO Michael Hyman, who led veterinary software startup Petabyte until Chewy bought it in 2022 for $43.4 million, said he looks for places with a lot of data and money and few companies making good use of the data. Petabyte co-founder Alex Krooglik, also a co-founder of Embrace Pet Insurance, is Rhodium's COO.

In what GeekWire called an unusual move for an early-stage software startup, Rhodium merged with three direct-to-consumer beauty brands: Rootine (wellness drink powders), SiO Beauty (skincare patches) and Solomomo (a device that measures skin condition). It plans to sell its software to spas and DTC beauty brands, using the portfolio to eat its own dog food.

Rhodium launched in March 2025 with about 25 employees and two investors, Relevance Ventures and Loeb Ventures, both earlier backers of Petabyte. It competes with software firms targeting spas and wellness clinics, including Seattle-area Zenoti, which ranks No. 2 on the GeekWire 200.

Hyman believes the beauty and med-spa industry underuses data for customer experience and revenue.

DTC beauty brands and spas face the same marketing challenges, so one platform can serve both.

Running its own brands lets Rhodium use its software internally, in Hyman's words, to eat its own dog food.

Relevance Ventures and Loeb Ventures, which had both backed Petabyte before, invested in Rhodium.

Owning the kind of customers you sell to gives a young software company live data and credibility, but it also ties the startup to the economics of consumer brands.

As of 2025-03-11 Rhodium has launched with $2 million, about 25 staff and three merged brands. It is using AI apps to speed development, according to Hyman. GeekWire reported no revenue or customer figures.